Mac Virtualization

I recently got myself a shiny pretty 24″ iMac and was thinking about installing some sort of virtualization to run Windows. Since I don’t really need Windows for anything on a Mac, I thought I’d give open source, i.e. VirtualBox another try  (see my previous post) and look it works perfectly. Version 1.6 now officially supports Mac OS X and it’s free.

There are a few restrictions in running this on OS X, all things I can personally live with:

• No support for Host Interface Networking
• No support for Internal Networking
• No support for audio input
• No support for VT-x/AMD-V (rarely required)
• No support for raw disk access
• The numlock emulation isn’t implemented yet
• The VirtualBox kernel extension is currently accessible from all user accounts

So far I haven’t even needed Windows. Really, the only application I can’t find for Mac is the VMWare Server Console, but I can just ssh into my Linux box and run it — the beauty of OS X being a full Un*x operating system including X11 support!

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